------------------------------------------------------LOS ANGELES -- For the starry-eyed computer engineers who attended a flashy Google recruitment party outside Los Angeles on Thursday night, it was as though the Internet bubble never burst.

The leading search-engine company drew some 200 prospective recruits to its Santa Monica, California offices, many of them eager to work in an office featuring an open kitchen, cushy chairs, a surfboard at the entrance and a dazzling array of lights projected on the roof.

"Google -- and this event -- are still kind of holding on to the tech bubble mentality," said Nathan Schurr, a doctoral candidate in computer science at the University of Southern California who came to the party to see what Google had to offer.

What it did offer, at least for one night, were hors d'oeuvres from the kitchen of legendary chef Wolfgang Puck, car parking by a band of beautiful women who call themselves Valet of the Dolls and multiple open bars.

Google, recently named global brand of the year for the second year running, is expected to make many of its employees wealthy in an initial public offering, forecast to take place this year. Its founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, recently joined Forbes magazine's list of global billionaires.

"We really want to get serious about expanding our research and engineering center down here," Wayne Rosing, Google's vice president of engineering, told Reuters.

The company, he said, has virtually a limitless appetite for hiring right now.

"The limit to our growth is our ability to get the best talent on the planet and get them working on the toughest computing problems around," said Rosing, a former executive vice president of engineering at Sun Microsystems.

But he, and other Google employees at the party, said finding people who fit into the company's admittedly oddball culture is just as important as finding those with talent. Staffers with dyed hair were commonplace. One employee, bearing a striking resemblance to a Biblical figure with long hair and a scraggly beard, walked around barefoot all night.

"We hire both for technical brilliance and for culture," said Alan Eustace, vice president of research and systems engineering. Eustace, who spoke as a series of scrolling Google queries was projected on the wall behind him, spends 30 percent to 40 percent of his time on hiring-related issues.

The rapidly expanding company, with more than 1,000 employees worldwide, has major engineering centers in Mountain View, California, New York, Zurich and Santa Monica. It is looking at Tokyo and China for further expansion.

Many at the party, who got invitations after being recommended by professors or acquaintances already at the company, wanted in on that growth.

"I think Google has become kind of a standard section of our lives," Schurr said.